I am writing this as an unbiased, factual account of my experience with the user Starling here and his company. There was no request for this to be written--I write this in the hopes that many other folks here, searching for answers to their crashed HDs, will have similarly favorable experiences.

My Western Digital 1200JB hard drive crashed out of the blue one night. One moment it was there, functioning perfectly. The next, Windows kindly informed me it could not find my IDE drives. After a bit of deduction, I found that the drive was at fault, not the IDE connection, the mobo, etc. As a "power user," I wanted to try to do everything (reasonable) to attempt to fix this myself.

Based on what many others had described, I thought that perhaps the PCB had fried. I very fortunately located the same board on ebay and purchased it. The funny thing was that there were no burn signs on my PCB. I tried just swapping the PCB from the identical purchased drive, but this did not help.

I found this forum, which seemed to be the most active and would give me the best answers. I listed my symptoms, and Starling (and also many others), responded with some helpful ideas on what could be the problem. Firmware corruption was the most likely possibility. After more troubleshooting by Starling, I was convinced he knew his stuff.

I received a quote from Starling, and because it was purely personal data (not corporate), there was a significant discount. He was international, and there were many other closer facilities I could have used. However, because he had helped me on the forums, I felt it was worth it.

Assuming it may be a firmware corruption, I shipped both the crashed drive and the replacement drive (to be used for parts or to return the data). Because it was international, it took ~1 week for the HD to arrive. Starling was very diligent with following the tracking--I had to redo the shipping due to some misinformation the Fedex people gave me, and Starling was quick to notify me that the original shipment had been returned.

Once received, it turned out that unfortunately it was not as easy as a firmware corruption. 1 drive head was faulty, and apparently another was about to fail! By some miracle, the data on the hard drive was saved! I received a text-list of the files recovered. Everything I needed was still intact. Even though the hard drive problem was not what was initially expected, the quoted price was kept!! I paid via PayPal.

I anxiously received the return HD ~1 week later and connected it to my computer to copy over the essential files. BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THIS DISK TOO HAD FAILED! The packaging was quite good, so we can only assume the HD was really abused in transit.

I e-mailed Starling immediately, hoping that he still had a copy of the data. Thankfully he did, and he began to put up the most important files the next day on an FTP server. I'm downloading them currently as we speak.

I'm hoping this will be the end of this ordeal. Starling have been stellar in keeping me updated on the status of my hard drive and especially helping in the ridiculous surprise that awaited the return of my HD. I had a great experience and god forbid this happens again, would definitely go to them again.

Just an update after the returned HD turned out to have crashed, likely in transit:

Starling put up nearly 18gigs of my recovered HD on a ftp server. Obviously, it took a while to get it all uploaded, but no problems at all with downloading it on my end.

Once again, a great outcome.